“My Life Has Been Taken!” - Recollection of Service on Eniwetok Atoll by Orville Kelly, US Army (195

By Marcy Damovsky / T Tatching

Berkeley Barb - Independent Voices Nov 29 – Dec 12, 1979

22 hydrogen bombs go off ! lt does something to you,” said Orville Kelly, formerly a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army. In 1957 and 1958, Kelly was stationed on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, while the Department of Defense conducted a series of atmospheric atomic tests. What that did to him, he believes, is give him cancer. Kelly is now in the final stages of lymphocytic lymphoma. He’ll probably be dead in a year. “I can’t find it in my heart to be totally bitter,” Kelly said, at a press conference in San Francisco, this week. “But I do feel bitter that more people will die from cancer than died in the last 14 years of war. I’m bitter because I’ve been reading letters from widows with no money. I’m bitter because of the government’s reluctance to compensate people injured in the Cold War.”

He stopped for a moment before continuing, “I guess I am bitter. I’m very angry that my life has been taken by the actions of my own country.” For the past six years, Kelly has been battling the Veterans Administration, trying to get recognition and compensation for the connection between his exposure to radiation from the H-bombs and his cancer. The VA turned his case down three times, but this week Kelly was informed that the Board of Veterans Appeals had ruled that “enough of a reasonable doubt existed to allow my claim.” The VA has good reason to hedge its words. Between 1946 and 1962, more than 400,000 soldiers and civilians were involved in 183 atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. Until 1977, the government made no effort at all to determine the long-term effects of this radiation exposure. When the HEW finally did a study of 3000 men who had witnessed a 1957 blast in Nevada, they found twice the normal leukemia rate. Atomic veterans are also suffering from bone marrow diseases, sterility, respiratory disease, eye disease, birth defects in their children, and many kinds of cancer.

In November 1957, when Orville Kelly took command of Japtan Island in the Eniwetok Atoll, no one told him that 21 nuclear bombs had already been exploded in the area. “There we were on a tropical paradise with a beautiful beach,” he recalls. “Things weren’t too bad until that May morning when they set off the first blast.” That bomb, the beginning of Operation Hardtack I, was detonated about seven miles away from Japtan Island. “I had to gather all my men out on the open beach facing the blast. We all had goggles, but no protective clothing at all. My orders were to make sure every man was on that beach. We didn’t know what to expect. When the countdown got to zero, the island shook and a huge fireball started forming.”

The blasts continued at about two per week, for twelve weeks, and each time the men on Japtan Island and others on ships, in planes and on other islands, observed the tests. “My men were so terrified that it was hard to maintain discipline and get them out there on that beach,” says Kelly. “They didn’t even know about the radiation, but they were terrified, just like I was.” The men at Eniwetok Atoll were measured only for gamma radiation and only by means of the film badges that many scientists today consider inaccurate. No attempt was made to monitor their exposure to alpha-emitting particles (such as plutonium) that were stirred up by the explosions.

Even these cursory measurements were only taken during the time the bombs were being set off. In Kelly’s case he wore a film badge for five months out of the twelve he was at Eniwetok. And the drinking water for Kelly and his men was distilled from the lagoon. When Kelly was discharged, Army doctors told him he’d been exposed to 3445 millirems of gamma radiation. Dr. John Gofman estimates that in the situation Kelly describes, he probably received more like 20,000 millirems. Several other ex-GI’s joined Kelly at this week’s press conference. Andy Hawkinson was an 18 year old military police at Eniwetok Atoll during Operation Hardtack I. Today, at 40, he has had cataracts in both eyes, a condition that usually affects people much older.

Besides the surgical procedures to remove the cataracts, Hawkinson has undergone five operations for retinal separation. “Being literate, I started to read about my condition,” Hawkinson said. “Any ophthalmology textbook will tell you that cataracts are caused by radiation but Hawkinson hasn’t received a nickel from the Veterans Administration. “I think the government owes me, at least my medical expenses — including the cost of the check-ups for cancer I’m going to get every six months. No one talks about the psychological effects — the hell and damnation you go through wondering when they’ll find cancer or leukemia.” In spite of it all, Hawkinson says, “I’d go back in the Army today, if it was to defend the country. I’d go back to Vietnam.

But if it meant being sent to Eniwetok, I just might not do it.” Orville Kelly also retains “a certain fondness for the military.” He just wants the Armed Forces to realize that “because radiation is a silent killer, doesn’t make it any less deadly.” The last nuclear bomb at Eniwetok Atoll was set off in 1958, but the islands, of course, remain highly radioactive. In 1977, the U.S. government agreed to clean things up so that the people who had lived on Eniwetok before the testing could return from their forced exile. Three thousand American soldiers participated in the cleanup operation, which involved burying 110,000 cubic yards of radioactive soil and debris in a bomb crater and capping it with an 18 inch thick concrete cover.

Though more protective clothing and more monitoring are required now, recently returned GI’s have a new crop of horror stories. “We were getting the shaft and being used as experimental human beings and we knew it,” said John Levitt. Mark Goodman of San Jose saw some soldiers in the cleanup wearing only surgical masks. “It’s a Catch-22,” he said. “They tell us there’s no danger, but if that’s true, what were we decontaminating?” In addition to those at Eniwetok Atoll, GI’s were exposed to significant doses of radiation during cleanup operations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the month following the 1945 bombings, and during nuclear tests in Nevada, where the government sent soldiers within 900 yards of ground zero, to determine how troops would be affected by nuclear war.

Eight hundred soldiers or their widows have claims pending against the Veterans Administration, for health problems they say are related to radiation exposure. Kelly, who founded the National Association of Atomic Veterans in 1974, believes that many more exposed veterans “remain in the closet,” out of hopelessness or fear of revealing classified information. “When you’re in the Army you do what you’re told,” he said, “and in the Army you’re told to keep your mouth shut.” Another part of the problem is that GI’s are not allowed to sue the government. “

As it stands now, the military could order a man to march off a cliff and if he did it the government would not be responsible,” Kelly explained. So all claims for compensation must be made within the VA framework. The most a GI dying of radiation-induced cancer can hope for is disability payments, medical expenses, and benefits for his wife and children — the same as for any service-related problem. “It’s costing $100 million to clean up Eniwetok Atoll,” Kelly pointed out. “But when I die my wife will get $300 a month.” Though the National Association of Atomic Veterans is “a room in the basement, off the furnace room,” the group has already been contacted by thousands of veterans or their widows for help with claims for radiation injuries.

NAAV has also joined a national coalition that, this week, unveiled plans for “Citizens’ Hearings for Radiation Victims,” to be held “in the shadow of the Capitol in Washington” next spring. The “citizens’ tribunal” will also provide a forum for nuclear plant workers, uranium miners, and people exposed to unneeded medical radiation.

Source: http://voices.revealdigital.com/cgi-bin/independentvoices?a=d&d=BFBJFGD19791129.1.4&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN---------------1#